One of the benefits of the digital age is widespread access to archives that might otherwise never be seen by more than a few people. A good example is The New York Department of Records’ database of over 870,000 photos of NYC, and a new case in point is PhotosNormandie. Read more…
Back in 1998, PC World magazine published a review of the Sony Mavica MVC-FD71 as the digital camera industry was beginning to pick up steam. He’s what they wrote:
[...] the original model took about 8 seconds to save a photo to a disk, this version averaged a more tolerable 4 seconds. In addition, Sony has added some nifty new features. These include the ability to make copies of floppies using just the camera–very handy if you want to hand out extra disks on the spot. A new quarter-resolution (320 by 240) option also makes it faster to e-mail photographs. (The camera’s full resolution is 640 by 480.) A built-in menu on the MVC-FD71′s LCD screen permits you to easily take advantage of useful new options such as these.
My main complaint? The high price tag. List-priced at $799, the Mavica costs more than many high-quality 35mm cameras. And as with most digital cameras, this model fails to deliver image quality that is comparable to the quality produced by a 35mm.
The reviewer also commends the camera for weighing in at just 1.2 pounds.
Sony Mavica Camera Slims Down, Speeds Up [PCWorld via MetaFilter]
Image credit: Sony Mavica MVC-FD71_0433 by Bobolink
Jack Robinson was a quiet man who mostly kept to himself, which explains why it was his boss, Dan Oppenheimer, who was left to take care of his estate when he passed. Little did Oppenheimer realize, however, that when he opened the closet in Jack Robinson’s incredibly tidy apartment, he would find a collection of pristine portraits of celebrities that Robinson shot in his early days as a commercial photographer for Vogue.
As it turns out, Robinson had acquired over 150,000 prints of famous ’50s, ’60s and ’70s icons ranging from Joni Mitchell to The Who before falling victim to alcoholism and moving to Memphis, leaving that life behind. And now interested parties will be able to get their hands on more of Robinson’s work than ever before in a book titled: Jack Robinson On Show: Portraits 1958-72. If you’re interested in seeing more of Robinson’s portraits, pay a visit to his online archives.
The Jack Robinson Archive (via NPR via Coudal Partners)
Back in February the New York Times launched a new site called “The Lively Morgue” for regularly sharing photos from its historical archive of the same name. The video above gives an interesting behind-the-scenes glimpse at this amazing underground archive that stores millions of historical photographs and 300,000 sacks filled with negatives.
(via DEVELOP Tube)
The New York Times has launched a new Tumblr site called “The Lively Morgue” to breathe new life into items in the newspaper’s photo archive (nicknamed “The Morgue”). Each week they’ll be sharing several historical photographs found in massive collection. Just how massive?
We don’t know. Our best guess is five million to six million prints and contact sheets (each sheet, of course, representing many discrete images) and 300,000 sacks of negatives, ranging in format size from 35 millimeter to 5 by 7 inches — at least 10 million frames in all. The picture archive also includes 13,500 DVDs, each storing about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery. When the Museum of Modern Art set out to exhibit the highlights of the Times archive in 1996, it dispatched four curators. They spent nine months poring over 3,000 subjects, working with two Times editors, one of whom spent a year on the project. In the end, they estimated that they’d seen only one-quarter of the total. [#]
To make the project even more interesting, they’re also publishing an image of the reverse side of each print. This often reveals information such as how often the image was used, notes by the photographer, and the original caption that was chosen.
The Lively Morgue (via NYT)
In 1999 Corbis — privately owned by Bill Gates — paid $20 million to acquire Sygma, a legendary photo agency that was the largest in the world at the time. After the acquisition, the agency bled money and suffered heavy fines due to the mismanagement of photographs, paying $2 million at one point for losing 750 of one photojournalist’s photos. In 2010 the new agency, named Corbis Sygma, filed for bankruptcy after its debt had risen to €73m (~$100 million). Now the court appointed administrator of the defunct company is saying that millions of images in the collection may be destroyed after a failed attempt to sell them at auction.
Read more…
